The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Friday, August 26, 2016

Blanche and Hillary

For over 3 years, the State Department and the broader Obama administration did a good job of stonewalling all attempts to access emails from Hillary Clinton's notorious private server and from their own internal files. Hillary, for her part, did everything possible to obstruct justice by deleting thousands of emails that despite her protestations, had little to do with yoga, her grandchild's birthday party, or anything else of personal import. Democrats acting as a veritable monolithic machine, argued against common sense and the facts and suggested that all of this was a right wing conspiracy and that there was no there, there. The mainstream media, despite a few professional exceptions, generally tried to protect their candidate (Hillary) by covering the story half-heartedly at best and investigating the details with all the enthusiasm of an 8 year-old who is being forced to do her homework.

And yet, with every passing week we get more information about Clinton's misuse of government office to enrich herself and her family, influence peddling in an on-going pay-for-play scheme, and the improper and unethical nexus of the State Department and The Clinton Foundation. Austin Bay comments:

“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” says the frequently delusional Blanche Dubois near the bitter end of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire.

Ah yes, kind strangers. It’s a playwright’s loaded line. Put bluntly, Miss Blanche may practice intermittent prostitution. According to rumors, before her New Orleans travails, Blanche lost her Mississippi hotel digs because her scandalous associations with menfolk tarnished the joint’s reputation. This naughty gossip, Blanche’s louche behavior, her iffy relationship with what we might call the truth—the drip, drip, drip of on-stage evidence—leads many play-watchers to conclude, yeah, right, Tennessee Williams, I get it. That kind of kind strangers, the kind that tip the tart.

Blanche Dubois is a fictional character. Hillary Clinton often inhabits a fictional universe. Claiming she was targeted by snipers in Bosnia and telling Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace that FBI Director James Comey exonerated her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information are just two examples of Hillary’s fictional existence. However, Hillary’s State Department was no cheap Mississippi hotel, and the latest batch of emails confirming close, coordinated contact between Hillary’s top State aides and the kind strangers who donate to the Clinton Foundation ain’t rumors spread by traveling salesmen. Even The Associated Press is troubled by the number of Clinton Foundation donors with quick access to Hillary’s senior staff. The second paragraph in the AP report has numbers, not rumors:

“At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.”

“Released so far.” That’s the AP acknowledging the drip, drip, drip technique. More of Hillary’s emails continue to appear, including emails she swore she destroyed because they were personal.

Indeed, it appears evidence of an axis has emerged, drip by drip, an axis that operationally connected Clinton Foundation donors to Hillary’s State Department. That suggests from 2009 to 2013, when she was secretary of state, Hillary ran a hybrid organization—what we might call the Clinton State-Foundation—which served the needs of Foundation donors, in return for their… kindnesses.

If the Clinton State-Foundation looks like a pay-to-play bribery operation, well, it sure looked like Blanche Dubois was sleeping around a bit with kind strangers, didn’t it?

Of course, the Clintons always strike back when yet another scandal hits. As I have noted in other posts, their M.O. is to change the subject as quickly as possible ... so a few days ago, Hillary called Donald Trump a "racist" and suggested that he is a KKK sympathizer. Trump took the bait and struck back, calling Hillary names. The media gleefully forgot about the damning evidence of Hillary's pay-for-play criminality and jumped into the racism debate.

Hillary Clinton—a politician so corrupt she'd make Tammany Hall pols blush—wins another round and escapes to fight another day. The Democrats, who rarely try to win a political argument on its merits but instead always seem to feel comfortable condemning their opponents as "racists," breath a sigh of relief as they continue forward with a candidate who will bring new meaning to corruption and dishonesty as President of the United States.

UPDATE:
---------------A.B Stoddard nails it when she writes about Hillary:

Clinton does defiance, denial and deflection but not accountability. Her persecution complex prohibits it, so she instead projects all sorts of terrible deeds onto unknown, even fictional Republicans, whom she has held responsible over the years for everything from her husband’s sexual affair with an unpaid White House intern to an Obama administration investigation into her rogue email server. And when situations call for specifics, like in an FBI interview, well it’s fair game to throw good people like Colin Powell under the bus.

Democrats continue to find this gobsmacking, but it’s nothing new. Who could imagine the gall it would take, while running for president -- a second time -- to take government records and store them on an unsecured server vulnerable to hackers? Did she not think that someday, when those inevitable congressional investigators came poking around, let alone Freedom of Information Act requests from the press, she would be caught not using the government email system she was required to?

Why, as secretary of state, would Clinton permit even the appearance of the co-mingling of foundation business with her official duties, as emails among her top staffers have already demonstrated?

And what moxie did it take for Clinton, upon leaving the State Department and biding her time before another presidential campaign, to go out and give highly paid speeches to corporate and financial interests, some totaling $250,000 for an hour or less?

Observers blame Clinton for being tone deaf. But that’s not remotely the case. She gets it, she just doesn’t care. If she looks greedy, arrogant, above the law and eager to cut corners, so be it. No matter how virulent the storm, there’s a rainbow ahead -- it’s always about the ends and never the means, or the bad press.

There is no good reason to risk tainting her presidency with the foundation’s fundraising, but the Clinton family name, the financial bottom line and a Chelsea-next political dynasty has always been knotted up in the goal of good works. The foundation’s current projects could operate independently of the Clintons by merging with another charity. As the Boston Globe wrote: “If the foundation’s donors are truly motivated by altruism, and not by the lure of access to the Clintons, then surely they can find other ways to support the foundation’s goals.”

Of course they could, but altruism is the farthest thing from the minds of virtually every foreign government and most corporate entities, not to mention oligarchs, Arab princes, and the like, who donate to obtain access and favors. It ain't altruism at all—it's corruption of the highest order.

About Me

Over the years, I’ve been an engineer, a manager, a professor, a consultant, an author and an entrapreneur. Today, I work with my sons at Evannex, an automotive aftermarket products manufacturer and e-commece company that specializes in electric vehicles. I've written a number of best-selling college textbooks and have tried the occasional novel.
I’ve lived long enough to see the irrationality in extreme positions taken by both ends of the political spectrum and worry that decisions driven by these positions may get us all into very real trouble. I harbor no illusions about influencing decision-making, only making a comment or two that might provoke you to think beyond the prevailing narrative.
On a personal level, I’ve been married for 48 years (to the same person!) and have two terrific sons who live and work in South Florida and are partners in a business we've created.
I'm originally from Connecticut, but have lived in SoFla for almost 20 years.